“Did You Read?”

Caroline posted a link to this clip from “Portlandia”, starring SNL’s Fred Armisen (meh) and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein (YAY!) to our Facebook page last night. The clip seems to be skewering hipsters and print fetishists, but it could totally apply to grad school during the coursework years once you substitute the periodicals Armisen and Brownstein banter about with, say, theory texts or obscure fiction. Just set the clip in generic grad student housing and you get an idea what a UCI English and Comp Lit party, circa late 1990s, was like, in case you were ever wondering…

On a related note, Brownstein probably knows a little bit about what she’s mocking here: While there’s scuttlebutt online that Brownstein, who graduated from Evergreen State College with a sociolinguistics degree, attended grad school at Berkeley for six months before dropping out, Brownstein cleared up the matter in an interview with the SF Bay Guardian in 2005 by basically explaining that she realized the she could never be an academic after being around academia: “I’d always thought academia was pulling me in a different direction from the band. I was living in the East Bay, in Berkeley, and it was actually being in that milieu that made me realize I didn’t want it, that it was too esoteric and insular.” So basically, you could call Brownstein a pre-postacademic!